Not waving

I am absolutely wallowing in self-pity.

I am not only wallowing, I am drowning. I am sloshing about and occasionally ducking my head underneath to come up bubbling and spitting.

I am the most sorry-for-myself diarist you are likely to read this morning, or this evening, or whenever you have found ten minutes spare to dip into these pages.

Kindly send me all of your available sympathy, neatly packaged and don’t forget the stamp.

The reason for this colossal self-indulgence has been brought about by a minor health-difficulty.

I am being Inspected, by our glorious and much applauded National Health Service, to see if they can determine the source of my mildly malfunctioning digestive system. Regular readers and indeed close acquaintances might have observed that I am prone to bouts of indigestion and general discomfort, and tomorrow is the day earmarked by their Digestive Clinic for me to go under their glorious and much applauded microscope.

This sounds like a walk in the park, if it wasn’t that walks in the park are not exactly relaxing, and tend to involve a lot of bellowing at the dogs and running after them to try and see where they have attempted to have a secret poo. They do not like being observed in this activity.

I can sympathise with that.

Actually it is more like a walk in the park than you might otherwise expect, because I had a telephone call a couple of days ago from a presumably under-paid but obviously much-applauded National Health Service minion, who explained that I would be obliged to empty out my digestive system entirely in readiness for the Inspection.

I was a little confounded by this.

This would involve, the minion explained, several days of eating a fibreless diet, followed by, horror of horrors, a final flushing of all cylinders with a laxative.

I began to wonder if I would not prefer indigestion. Indeed, I began to wonder if an early death might be preferable.

Still, I acquiesced, being of a generally docile disposition, as you know, and indeed, a day or two later a diet sheet arrived in the post, wrapped around some ominous-looking sachets of powder.

We will skip the tedium about the diet. Suffice to say that I had no idea that my normal diet was so completely rich in fibre and generally packed with health-giving nutrients.

It seems that absolutely everything I like to eat was not on it.

That isn’t actually true. I could eat white bread and cheese and chocolate. What I couldn’t eat was fruit and vegetables. I did not think I ate fruit and vegetables, but it turns out that I do, a very lot.

I have spent the last few days gazing longingly at Mark’s salads, and feeding myself salad with all the vegetables left out, by which I mean cheese. I don’t eat much meat anyway, because of the indigestion, although I could have eaten as much as I liked, which turned out to be none at all.

I found myself staring into the fridge, looking at the raspberries and the mango and the lettuce and the raw carrot, and thinking Just one wouldn’t hurt, like an alcoholic in recovery.

I resisted, however, and have been virtuously eating cheese without tomatoes ever since.

I could have eaten tomatoes, the minion explained, as long as I peeled them first and removed the seeds. Sometimes I think the NHS has unrealistic ideas about the way people’s personal lives work, because no matter how much I was craving tomatoes, there are limits.

Anyway, the magnificent climax to the three days of horrible diet is, of course, the terrible powders, one tonight and one in the morning.

Even washed down with a cup of tea they are unspeakably disgusting. So disgusting, in fact, that they have to be drunk slowly through a straw, over the course of an hour, because otherwise they make you sick.

Even following the instructions faithfully is making me feel very nauseous indeed. There is loads and loads of it, I am beginning to feel like Professor Dumbledore when Harry Potter compelled him to drink half of the lake to get to the enchanted whatever it was.

I have compelled Mark to go out to work. Love should not be asked to be a spectator at such an undignified proceeding.

They have not begun to work yet. I have spared you that detail.

Excuse me whilst I duck my head under again.